Former CDC director Richard Besser critiqued President-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services on Sunday, calling Kennedy “cruel” for continuing to push theories that vaccines can cause autism.

“This was a question that was asked and addressed decades ago, and to continue to lift that up is a cruel thing to do,” Besser said on ABC’s “This Week” to host Martha Raddatz.

Besser, the president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, was the acting CDC director from January to June 2009.

“We should address chronic diseases — autism is one of those — and spend money trying to understand what are the causes of autism, and how can you address that,” he continued. “But to keep lifting up the idea that it has something to do with vaccination is really a cruel thing to do.”

Kennedy has long been an anti-vaccine activist, founding the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. He took leave from the group in 2023 to campaign for president.

When asked about Kennedy’s record on vaccines — claiming that he would not take them away from anyone — Besser said it was less about taking them all away and more about the individualistic choices.

“It’s pushing the idea that vaccines should be something that is totally up to the individual,” he told Raddatz. “We have a social contract in our country. There are things we do for our own health, but there are things we do that are good for ourselves, our families and our communities, and vaccination falls into that category and having somebody who denies that in that role is extremely dangerous.”

He emphasized that the dangerous thing about Kennedy’s nomination is that parts of what he says are true, making “it really hard to sort out what things you should follow because they’re based on fact, and which things are not.”

While Trump repeatedly promised that Kennedy would have a big role in public health during his campaign, news of his nomination came as a surprise to many politicians, as well as health care officials.

“I am outraged because lives are at stake here,” Besser said.

“The head of Health and Human Services touches programs that affect every single life in our country,” Besser said, adding, “To have someone leading HHS who is one of the biggest deniers of vaccines in our country, would undermine the confidence in that program and likely would cost lives.”